The presentation itself went well and I think the timing went smoothly. Luckily I only had one Americano otherwise I would have been twitchy.

I did contemplate installing SQL Server 2008 R2 on my laptop before the presentation; more or less because I was curious if much has changed in the T-SQL realm when jumping from 2008 to 2008 R2. Of course I didn’t because Presentation Skills 101 says that you shouldn’t mess with your demo environment just before the presentation. Now that the presentation is over I intend to install R2 (Nov CTP) to see what has changed.

For those of you looking for my presentation and demo sample you can find them at http://www.vancouvertechfest.com/Downloads/tabid/450/language/en-US/Default.aspx .

Also, the session was recorded just keep going back to http://www.vancouvertechfest.com to see if it has been uploaded yet.

 Needless to say after going through the logs all that was left was a SQL mini-dump log of this:

A first we thought perhaps it was a fluke, but then it occurred a couple week later.  This is when we opened a call to Microsoft who then told us to put the trace flag -T2330 into the Startup Parameters of the clustered instance.

 Then we thought that is was perhaps a NUMA issue introduced in one of the Cumulative Hotfix Updates.   As it turns out the trace flag actually turns of  tracking if Index Usage stats collection.  In this case an index was being created on a temp table in the tempdb, furthermore this is a known issue in SQL Server 2005, but it said to have been fixed in SQL Server 2008.

 So for anyone seeing mysterious non-yielding scheduler in the error logs try adding -T2330 to the startup parameters or upgrade to SQL Server 2008.

 I did recently notice however that recently this KB article came out on November 2nd, 2009 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974205 which suggests that CU6 should fix the issue, personally, I’m going to leave that trace flag in until I migrate to SQL Server 2008, because my users notice 10 minutes of outage!!!

 - Rich Baumet

This year had a few first’s for me:

                1. Twitter – I try not to bend to the will of popularity but there is some sustenance to this “mini-blog” (quoting someone one this but fail to remember who…) My twitter name is @RichBaumet

                2. Karaoke – Again, I bent to the will of popularity but for good reason.  There are some serious voices in the PASS community (not mine)

                3. Itzik Ben-Gan – I thought I understood most thing about T-SQL until Itzik.  Never been to one of his sessions until pre-con and I may very well see his session every chance I get.

                4. Kimball – This year I tried to go to something different and this is one of those that I will go back to the recordings to watch again. 

                5. Women in Technology Luncheon – Pleasantly surprised by the passion and the turn out.  I think it was important for me to take for I can be oblivious to some issues.

So all in all I learned something new, got answers to some questions I had, met new people,  and reconnected with old friends.  Summit 2009 was the best one yet in terms of content and community, and it didn’t need Guitar Hero to achieve that! 

So what can top that next year?  Tweets suggest a duo presentation of Buck Woody and Paul Randal in kilts!  So if you missed out in 2009, then you better signup for 2010! 

On a final note, hats off to PASS and the entire community that came out because it rocked!  And I apologize for not listing off everyone I met and had fun with for fear of forgetting someone, but I’ll see you all again next year.

 - Rich Baumet